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Origin & History of “gram”

Gram, or gramme as it is sometimes spelled, was borrowed at the end of the 18th centuryfrom French gramme, the term adopted in 1799 as the basic unit of weight in the metric system. The word itself goes back via late Latin gramma ‘small unit’ to Greek grámma (source of Englishgrammar), which originally meant ‘letter of the alphabet’ but later came to be used for ‘small weight’.